December 18, 2014

Wrong Doing, Truth Telling

"[Foucault] wanted to make us suspicious of the kinds of narratives that make the past look like a long dark night of error, leading up to the dawning of truth in our own time. He wanted to persuade us that the institutions and intuitions that strike us as obvious and inevitable may really be accidents that might never have happened. And he wanted to remind us that if our predecessors look cruel and credulous to us, we are likely to look just as bad in the eyes of our successors. Even our confidence in our own rationality, as contrasted with the madness of others, is liable, he suggested, to crumble into dust: 'one day, perhaps, we will no longer know what madness was'."